Sins of The Father
by wikiaddicted723
Summary: "He'd never truly understood Walter, until that day at the park, until that night." The team in 2036, or what's left of it.


**A/N:** In preparation for the season Premier, have a humble interpretation of the various snippets out there. This plot bunny attacked me and would not let go for the longest time. It's just snippets of scenes, really. I hope it makes some sense, and that you enjoy it. Let me know what you thought of it.

* * *

Hell is a place on earth. It doesn't matter what priests profess, what they say about infernal states — that hell is not a location, not something you experience in the flesh. That it is solely a phenomenon of the soul, eternal suffering in metaphysical terms. Peter's done his reading. The basis of debate is knowing all sides to the issue at hand, and he's always wanted to prove how religion is inherently wrong.

He has proof now. Oh, he has proof.

Imagine lying in the tub with your head beneath the water. Hold your breath until you can't. Hear the silence interrupted by the thumping of your heart against your ribs, the sound of blood rushing to your head. Feel the pressure of the air trapped inside your lungs, pushing at your sternum from the inside out like it wants to cut through bone and flesh and veins and run away. Open your eyes. Under, you can see only blobs, blurry shapes. Still, you look; of the five, six, however many, sight remains your dominant sense. Pretty normal, isn't it?

Go back. Feel your heart stop. It doesn't hurt, not in this case. It's very much like being tapped in the chest with a Taylor hammer, the small triangular ones doctors use to test reflexes. Doesn't take long at all, even less than blinking. Your heart stops, and so the silence overwhelms your ears, sneaks inside you slowly, like the pouring of a heavy liquid. It drenches every fiber, fills your every pore. Drowns you from the inside out with a lungful of air still prisoner between your ribs, providing counter-pressure. But you don't die, not in the literal sense, at least. You think…whatever it is you think, in that small second, and the thought _stays_.

This is hell. It is for you. It is personal and nontransferable. It stretches on and on and on. You can't move, can't feel, can't breathe. Can't close your eyes and hope for it go away when you wake up. How do you wake up when you can't sleep?

There is the thought, suspended in the vacuum that was once you, and there is nothing else. A second is infinite, and years go by, running like clumsy toddlers beneath your sightless eyes.

This is hell, and he has proof. He's lived it. For twenty years, he's lived it.

It's ironic, if nothing else, and irony and fate are the best of friends. After all, he put himself there. And now he's out thanks to a daughter that he barely knows, who shares his eyes and shares his wit but has her mother's soul. Her fire, her passion, her resolve. Peter feels it, every time she lays her big blue eyes on him and stares in wonder. In his gut, in his bones, he feels it. He's glad.

Being his blood is curse enough, she doesn't need his weakness to make the burden worse. He couldn't even keep the world from taking the one good thing that was left of him.

What kind of father lets his child be taken? What kind of man is so selfish to think a mother's pain could not be worse than his? He missed the evidence, it seems, the one written in his veins like ink.

If only he'd run faster, fought harder, that day. If he'd known the words to say, after, to keep from breaking what was left of them, his family.

What kind of man is _relieved _to feel the world fall away, if only to get some respite from the pain?

* * *

Olivia watches from a distance, and Peter watches her. He sees her apprehension, the one that makes her shape tense, sees the way it wars behind her eyes with the elation. She's afraid of the same thing she has always been afraid of: vulnerability, rejection. He knows the fear stems from guilt, the same one that sits heavy on his shoulders, gets heavier with every day that passes, with every off hand comment pertaining this newly fucked-up world coming from their daughter's mouth, describing things, events (cruel and twisted and inhumane) that no child should have witnessed.

Gone is their little girl, her innocence lost, crushed underfoot long ago. Instead, they're met with the woman she's become: hardened by circumstance, street smart, compassionate, brave and kind. It makes her proud, he knows, the same way it makes him proud. But it doesn't lessen the feeling of discordance, the dissonance that echoes in the spaces between memory and flesh. How do you go back to before? How can you be a parent to a woman with a hundred years in her stare and just a fourth of that etched on her face? How do you forgive yourself for not being there?

"You should talk to her," he says, the next time he catches her staring from afar. It's become a habit of hers, to watch Etta do the rounds around whatever safe house they're in for the night (this one is little more than a hole in the wall), sitting up on her futon in the dark. Peter crouches at her side, just far enough that he can make out the shape of her face, feel the heat of her body close to his but no closer than that. He's mindful of her space. Twenty years is a long time, outside, but in here, in the dark, he can still remember the angry tears that streaked down her face on his account with perfect detail, can replay the memory of her pain etched in his mind's eye like it was yesterday that they lost it all.

"And say what? What do I tell her, Peter? _Hello, sweetie, how was your day?_" her voice is weary, pained. They've only been out of the amber for a week and every day is a chore. Prolonged stasis affects the tissue, makes nervous responses slow. It passes, but not fast enough. "I have no idea how to do this."

"Oh, Liv. She's your daughter. She's been waiting for you for the last twenty years, I think she'd be ecstatic if you talked to her about the weather."

"But what if…what if she doesn't like me?" She says. He's wise enough not to laugh it off, no matter how ridiculous the notion might seem. Her fear is real, if unfounded.

"Well, she has to meet you first to decide that, doesn't she? Besides, if there's enough Bishop in her insides it's my guts she'll hate. Dislike for father figures passed down the generations and all that." She chuckles, but it's too light. There's no heart in the sound.

"I doubt that. You seem to get along just fine." There's the tiniest hint of envy in her eyes, a wistfulness to the set of her mouth. He smiles.

"It's simple Liv. She's a grown up now, just treat her like one. Get to know her. I know it hurts that…that we weren't there, but she's here, and she's healthy and she's fierce like we always knew she'd be. We can't go back, no matter how much we want to. And maybe we can't be her parents anymore, but who's to say we can't be her friends?"

He'd never truly understood Walter, until that day at the park, until that night. He'd come to terms with his abduction, yes, he'd understood his father's reasons, told himself he'd have done the same. He'd though he knew what it was like, to love someone so much you'd bring the world down, just to see them smile. To see them _alive_. He'd believed it. Like so many times before that, he'd believed a lie. The kind of lie people tell just so they don't have to face the monsters lying in the dark.

In truth, there is no comparison.

No one can know what it's like to loose a child, not really. Not until they do. By then, it's already too late. It's a pain that doesn't stop, corrodes everything exposed to the touch. It left his marriage in shambles, left him angry, heartbroken. A shell of a man. Olivia and him, they were friends before anything else, and partners before that, their threads too twisted around each other's to be separated without cutting them down. They were always too stubborn to give up. So they fought. They fought the Observers and they fought each other — through tears and anger and pain—and they fought themselves. Their lives became the fight, in those months (or was it years?) before the amber, before Walter sent her away with their failsafe, the key to the machine that's still unbuilt. It was all that was left of them, that single minded focus towards the only goal they had left to make some sense out of the mess of their lives.

He can't help but wonder if it's enough, now. If it'll ever be enough.

Olivia yawns.

"Go to bed, honey. We've got a building to raid in the morning." He can only hope the endearment goes unpunished. He still can't tell how to behave. He's not divorced, after all, and she's right there. On impulse and habit he leans down, to kiss her forehead goodnight perhaps. Hesitates. Stops himself. Sometimes it's better not to tempt fate.

Peter moves away, to his corner of the room by Walter's side. He misses the way her eyes linger on his back, in the night.

* * *

"Like this?" his daughter asks, holding the wire down with skinny fingers as she stands over him, over the electrical network he's got splayed out above his face, her look expectant.

"Exactly like that, sweetheart, just don't get burnt alright?"

"Not four anymore dad, remember?" He can almost hear the eye roll from his place on the ground, beneath the damned machine. He chuckles. It's like talking to himself, if there ever was a version of him that could compare to Olivia's strength.

"Don't need to be four to stick your finger into a soldering iron," he says, sticking his right hand up for her to inspect. "Hurts like a bitch."

"Oh, wow, were you blind or something?"

"A little drunk, maybe."

Etta laughs, and the flimsy wire structure rattles. "Sorry, sorry," she says.

"S'okay, if we manage to put this together backwards I'll be passing the mantle of 'Breaker of The Universe' down to you. It's a Bishop family tradition." He makes sure to put as much snark into his voice as he possibly can. There's little he likes more than making her laugh. She kicks his shoulder softly, chuckling, but says nothing.

"…Dad?" he hears the question later. Her voice is tentative.

"Yeah, honey?"

"Are you and mom...I mean, are you guys alright? It's just, I...I never see you together."

Peter sighs. He puts the iron down, and moves to the side. This isn't something he can run from, not anymore. He'd promised himself, long before she was born, that he'd never run again. Not from anything. Not even if he knows it might make her hate him.

"It's...complicated, I suppose. You have to understand, Etta, losing you…" he struggles with the words. Somehow, after all this time, they fail him. He shudders, remembering. "Nothing was the same. Your mother has always been strong. Strongest person I've ever met to tell the truth, but it…it broke us. I was selfish. It's a problem with me, you see. I couldn't really look beyond the fact that I'd had you inches away when they took you from me, and I didn't realize that those things I was feeling…they were only a fraction of what your mom was going through. And I wasn't there. For the first time since I met her, I wasn't there to pick her up, because I thought no pain could be worse than mine. It was our lowest moment, and I failed her." he stands up, and pats her arm, not quite able to meet her eyes. "Not much for an old man, huh?"

"Well, not if you're giving up," she says, her voice as serious as he's ever heard, and chiding. She sounds like Walter. Like his mother, the one he remembers, after a bad day. "Simon always said— and it's not like I ever really listened to him, but you know, sometimes I did— he always said _'broken things are just waiting to be fixed. It's why they're broken._'"

Peter stands there, transfixed. Who is this woman, he wonders. Because there's no way there's any part of him there. "I'm really gonna have to meet this guy, aren't I?"

She snorts. "He'll probably chew me out for not telling him who I was before. If we ever get him out that is." Her eyes are dim, distracted.

"Now I'm sad. I've been looking forward to using my shot gun rights since you were born."

"Twenty-four-year-old, Dad," she says, though she knows he's only joking. "Besides. Partner, slash boss, slash best friend— alcohol induced misjudgment non-inclusive._ So _not happening. And if we do get him out? I'll shoot him myself."

"Etta, honey, denial is a river in Egypt. I've tasted the water, and it's bitter. Just look at— wait, what?!" He chokes a little.

"Breathe, dad, breathe," she says, trying very, very hard not to laugh.

Whoever made him a father has the most wicked sense of humor Peter has even seen. He really needs to thank that son of a bitch.

* * *

Only Walter Bishop would ever get himself captured by Observers and manage to not get his brain melted into a particularly disgusting pile of unrecognizable goo. Peter had to give it to his father, he'd resisted a lot longer than any man he'd ever seen wiped.

It was a plus, he supposed, having years of experience with only fragments of his mind at hand at any given time. He knows there is brain damage, is almost sure that Walter knows as well. Or will know, after he gets some rest. It doesn't matter how short the exposure, there is always brain damage to some degree, the bastards make sure of that, at least.

It varies from person to person. Most never live long enough to tell the tale, the brain hemorrhaging so intense that, by the time they hit the ground, there is nothing that can be saved. No motor function, no single coherent thought. At that point, a fast death is a service. One that the bald heads will never stoop to make. Others, the lucky ones (and who ever came up with calling them that?), never regain speech, or eyesight, or whatever it is that is taken from them.

Again, it varies. In Walter's case, the results are bound to be much more colorful. He doesn't expect it to be something they can't deal with, not after almost half a century of brain damage, give or take a decade, but it's still not something he'd wish for anyone, least of all his dad.

They'd been lucky, of course. Nothing ever went smoothly for the Fringe Division of old, and some traditions remain. They endure, like memory, like blood. Their rescue mission had been a success, but they'd had to risk a lot to make it happen. Astrid got a couple of bad looking scratches, Olivia was still limping the last time he saw her, and his daughter has a particularly savage migraine. If it's anything compared to the ones her mother used to get, he pities her. He'd wanted to stay with her, but she'd refused, told him to go check on the rest, to make sure they were safe for the night. _"I can take care of myself," _she'd said, voice strained but not unkind. He'd left soon after that, to lick at his wounds if nothing else.

Being an absent parent has its consequences, Peter knows that. He used to be the son of one, once. But knowing, understanding, it doesn't lessen the hurt. Doesn't do much to ease the guilt either. So much for being a better man.

"I thought you'd be asleep by now," Olivia murmurs from the threshold, startling him enough to drop the cotton pad he'd been using to clean the cuts on his skin.

"Maybe your insomnia has finally rubbed off on me," he says, with a smile he doesn't feel. He's too tired for this. Too tired to fight.

"Funny, I remember you telling me about being familiar with it already. Caffeine pills, and something about a falsified degree, I think." She steps inside, the light making the dark circles under her eyes more pronounced, her cheeks gaunt. Disheveled. They really haven't had much time, with a rebellion brewing under their hands.

"That was a long time ago."

"Yeah," she sighs, wistful. "How's Walter?"

"He'll be fine. As fine as he's ever been without some bits of him, anyway. Just needs some rest."

"Here, let me," she says, grabbing a new pad to swab at his forehead and cheeks. "Etta's better. Her migraine's 'under control' apparently."

"Told you to get lost too, didn't she?" he smiles.

"She was a little more gentle than that, but yeah, I suppose she did." She looks at him then, through him, her hands on his cheeks, and he wishes he could turn back the clock, make time stop. "I never thought it would be like this, you know?"

"Like what?" He's almost afraid to ask.

"This, us. Avoiding each other all the time," she looks up, away, brushing the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. "Not to mention the part where our daughter's had to live her life without us. I guess I held on to the hope that, after everything we'd been through, we'd be alright. I should have known. Nothing stays." Her fingers card through his hair, but she's tense. Slightly awkward. Peter knows she's never felt entirely comfortable, talking like this. Of fears, of feelings. Of dreams.

"I'm still here," he says, and puts his hand over hers. "She hasn't left."

She nods. "I just wanted something that was mine, for once. "

"I'm sorry," he says, "the way I treated you, Olivia, I'm sorry." He wants to keep going, but she shakes her head, presses her forehead to his.

"I don't want to fight anymore. I don't want to keep wondering 'what if' every time I look at her with you. I just want my family back, Peter. Can you give me that?"

"I can try, Liv. I can try." _If it's the last thing I do._


End file.
